The challenge presently posed to humanity’s best and brightest is to develop practical ways and means for giving the “bottom billion” people access to safe and affordable sanitation that is pleasing to use and effectively removes human waste from the environment while recovering components that can be recycled.

The Reinvent the Toilet Challenge:
The initial phase of the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge involves offering grant support to exceptionally qualified, highly focused, innovative individuals and teams at selected universities with recent records of extraordinary engineering excellence in pertinent areas. The challenge is to commence the prototyping, conceptualizing, and designing of highly innovative ways and means of disposing of human waste in the high-value-engineered circumstances demanded by potential widespread, near-term adoption in the developing world.

Note that this Challenge is a separate process from the open calls for proposals issued by the Foundation as part of its “Grand Challenges Explorations” grant process.

Capabilities of primary interest to this challenge include acceptably disposing of the bodily wastes of a typical human adult for a total cost (capital and operating) of less than $0.05 per day. This “stretch goal” represents a large advance in cost-efficiency over contemporary “best available means” (e.g., those of life-support systems in underwater or space-going vehicles) even after taking credit for plausibly steep learning curves and mass production on indicated scales. Nonetheless, they represent the levels of economic efficiency that must be attained in order to have real potential for major favorable impacts on the human condition in the developing world during the next few decades.

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The Reinvent the Toilet Fair (14-15 August 2012, Seattle, USA) showcased innovations from around the world that are creating a new vision for the next generation of sanitation.

The fair aimed to inspire collaboration around a shared mission of delivering a reinvented toilet for the 2.5 billion people worldwide who don’t have access to safe and affordable sanitation.

The fair featured the foundation’s Water, Sanitation & Hygiene team’s earliest technology bets — most of the work presented received funding just over a year ago. During that time, grantees and partners have made some promising progress. The exhibits include efforts to reinvent the toilet, and approaches to improve the collection, treatment, and disposal of human waste. The fair was meant to spur partnerships and conversations about how we can work together to bring sanitation to those who need it most.

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The following projects are included in the Exhibitor Guide with detailed factsheets:

SuSanA Partners
• currently 248 partners

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